Widgetbox

People sometimes look at our website and assume that Widgetbox is just a directory or aggregator of web widgets. That’s really just scratching the surface of what we offer. Our mission is to be the leading marketplace for web widgets, and to make the marketplace truly work, we also provide a robust infrastructure for widget publishers to more easily share their content and applications. It’s like eBay providing a rich, robust marketplace for the hundreds of thousands of buyers and sellers who visit everyday.

Under the hood, Widgetbox provides a rich set of services for managing subscriptions, configuration, integration, and analytics of web widgets. Any widget developer can automatically take advantage of these capabilities simply by registering their widgets on our site. Today, we rolled out the latest component of our platform, Widgetbox Syndication Metrics, so that people can track and measure how widely their widgets are used.

This is an important milestone for the rapidly growing widget market especially as widgets are increasingly used to deliver new types of business and commerce applications. There is a lot of interest, discussion and testing of the waters around the monetization of widgets and the emergence of a widget economy. Before this can happen in any meaningful way, we need widget analytics to bring a widget economy to fruition. We need to have some mechanism to measure the performance of a widget and measure the success of its syndication strategy. How can you determine the value of your widget without the underlying data about its usage and performance?

With our Syndication Metrics, you, the widget developer, can assess the popularity and effectiveness of your widgets at a very fine level of granularity. We think it¹s like Google Analytics but for widgets. Now, you can track the spread of your widgets across the Internet and identify your biggest users are as well as most influential. You can also figure out the external triggers driving subscriptions, and make adjustments to maximize your widget’s exposure. You can identify which sites are driving the most traffic through your widget and forge strategic relationships. For the first time, the fog will lift and you’ll clearly be able to see which of your widget efforts are truly working.

As syndication metrics are tracked and analyzed over time, people can start to build indexes and benchmarks, create business and advertising models, place values on widgets, and understand the ROI on specific strategies, and so on. Today is the first step and we are anxious to see the impact of our Syndication Metrics on how widgets are built, syndicated and valued. Let me know what you think.